Ahh… recruiters.
Such a mysterious breed. And yet so essential to the hiring process.
So if you’re a job-seeker reading this, let me give you an insider tour of how to engage with recruiters on LinkedIn as a former LinkedIn insider myself (I used to work on LinkedIn’s Education team).
Here’s four things you need to know:
How recruiters use LinkedIn
How to find recruiters on LinkedIn
How to reach out to recruiters on LinkedIn
How to respond to recruiters on LinkedIn
How Do Recruiters Use LinkedIn?
Before we get into the specific tactics, it will help to understand who these mysterious creatures are and what they’re doing on LinkedIn in the first place… :)
And the most important thing to know about recruiters is that they’re like heat-seeking missiles.
Yes, you read that right.
Heat-seeking missiles for talent, to be precise.
What I mean is that recruiters have such an overwhelming job (juggling 30–40 open roles, each with 250 candidates, on average) that they just don’t have time to deal with a lot of ambiguity.
Either you can help them do their job (put the right talent into the right seat) or you’re wasting their time.
And that’s why they’re on LinkedIn in the first place. Because while reading through thousands of resumes that don’t fit the job is a giant decoy for a heat-seeking missile, LinkedIn is like the world’s best radar screen: The heat signal for all the right targets all in one place.
So with that awkward metaphor firmly established, let’s… err… go to battle to get you a great job! ⚡️
How Do You Find Recruiters on LinkedIn?
This is the easiest step because, like heat-seeking missiles themselves, recruiters are none too subtle.
First of all, they all have LinkedIn profiles themselves since they’re on the site constantly.
And secondly, their profiles are super easy to find because a big part of their job is being the face of the company.
So if you want to find recruiters for a specific company or industry, just follow these steps:
Search LinkedIn for “recruiter” - as mentioned, there are millions out there!
Filter by the areas that interest you - e.g., you could filter by Company = Google or Industry = Aerospace.
If you still have too many results (e.g., 3,700 recruiters at Google), feel free to add extra terms to the search box (e.g., “Technical” to find recruiters who specialize in engineer hiring or “University” to find those who recruit for internships)
Voila, your list of target recruiters now sits at your fingertips. But it does raise a new question…
How Do You Reach Out to Recruiters on LinkedIn?
This is where things get a little more tricky because here’s the deal about heat-seeking missiles: They’re heat-seeking.
In other words, if you’re just coming in with some lame-ass cold outreach (“Hey, uhh, could you help me get a job at Google…”), don’t expect to get their attention.
Instead, think like a recruiter and figure out what you can offer that’s a little, say, hotter… 🔥
Specifically, there are two things you can do to heat up your outreach:
Get a warm intro. I’m really working this heat metaphor, aren’t I? :) OK, OK, back to that whole “Let’s get you a job thing.”
Here’s the deal: Recruiters are unlikely to be excited about another random applicant reaching out when they already have 10K random resumes to deal with (remember that key stat - 40 openings to fill with 250 resumes each, on average).
But if you could make yourself non-random - i.e., a friend of a friend - that might be more than enough heat signal to capture their flighty interest.
And you can do exactly that by seeing who you know in common (or filtering for 2nd Degree Connections in LinkedIn parlance) and then having the mutual connection introduce you.
That simple difference will take you from a 0% likely response rate to a nearly 100% rate - because even heat-seeking missiles care about their friends!
Make yourself a hot target. If you can’t get someone else to go to bat for you, the next best thing is to go to bat for yourself.
Specifically, when you send the recruiter a personalized connection request (or better yet, look up their email on Hunter.io so you can be sure that your message gets through) don’t waste a single character on anything that isn’t focused on their only goal: Finding the right person for their job.
That means looking up their job description and spelling it out with the exact same verbiage. For instance, if the Product Manager job calls for someone who’s great at UX Research and X-Functional Collaboration, guess what your message should say:“I’m reaching out about your Product Manager role because the two things you called out in the JD are the exact two things I’ve built my career around: UX Research and X-Functional Collaboration. I’d be happy to provide examples of how I led both of those at Apple - just let me know if you’d like a copy of my resume.” While the hit rate here may not be as high as with the warm intro, it’s going to be a heck of a lot higher than applying cold (i.e., 1 in 250!).
How Should You Respond to Recruiters on LinkedIn?
I saved the best question for last: What if you’re lucky enough to have recruiters reaching out to you???
Happily, the advice here is a little more straightforward and it just depends on your particular interests:
If you’re at all interested in the opportunity, set-up a time to chat and/or send your resume. Obviously, if it’s your dream job, hop on that opportunity right away. But even if the fit is still a little murky, I recommend going for it because one of two things will happen:
Either it will turn out to be an awesome opportunity and you’ll be so glad that you gave it a chance…
Or it will turn out to be a lousy opportunity - but it will still give you leverage with the roles you actually care about because you can let the other recruiters know “Well, Google reached out to me last week so I’m weighing my options.” And if there’s one thing that heat-seeking missiles hate it’s letting someone else get their bogey first… ;)
If you’re not interested in the opportunity at all, do two things.
First of all, be sure to reply to the recruiter right away thanking them for their interest and asking them if they have any other roles that might be a better fit. That’s because not only might they be plugged into other opportunities, but LinkedIn’s algorithm actually penalizes candidates who don’t respond to InMails by pushing them lower in recruiter’s searches. That way, recruiters won’t have to waste time and InMails reaching out to low-probability candidates. So to ensure that you stay high in the rankings for your desired recruiters, be sure to respond quickly to all recruiters.
Secondly, if you keep getting opportunities that aren’t aligned with your interests, review your profile to see if there’s something in your Headline, About, Experience, or Skills section that’s leading recruiters astray. Especially if you’ve changed careers at any point, you may discover that you’re getting typecast by the old verbiage up there. And because even heat-seeking missiles aren’t equipped with ESP, recruiters can only go on what you’re giving them. So be sure to scrub away all the heat signals of your old career (e.g., taking down your CFA if you’ve moved from Accounting into Graphic Design) and double down on the signals relevant to your new one (e.g., listing your expertise in Figma and Creative Cloud).
Bonus Hack: Is Going After Recruiters on LinkedIn Even Worth Your Time?
As much as recruiters serve as gatekeepers to the interview process, they tend to be fairly set in their ways when it comes to the best way to find candidates.
And as heat-seeking missiles, that tends to boil down to just two channels:
Reviewing resumes
Searching for candidates on LinkedIn
So even the best-fit candidate may not be able to break through if they reach out themselves - after all, it’s just such a distraction from their routines and they’re getting buried in spam outreach from unqualified candidates anyway.
On the other hand, there’s one other key player in the hiring process we haven’t discussed - the hiring manager themselves!
And while we tend to think of hiring managers as impossible to identify before the interview stage, that’s starting to change on LinkedIn.
Namely, you know have thousands of hiring managers coming out of the woodwork and updating their profiles to say “I’m Hiring!” or “We’re Hiring!” That’s because as the war for talent heats up (there I go again… ;), a savvy boss doesn’t want to sit back at HQ and wait for talent to find them, they want to go out to the front lines and engage the best talent themselves.
Which means that by searching LinkedIn for “I’m Hiring” OR “We’re Hiring” (and then layering in some of the filters we discussed above), you can find not just recruiters but your future boss.
And, of course, if you know anything about bosses, if they want to hire you, you better believe you’re getting hired… :)
Reaching Out to Recruiters on LinkedIn: The Bottom Line
So take it from this former LinkedIn insider, LinkedIn can be an incredibly powerful place to network with the key insiders in your industry.
Just don’t limit yourself to cold outreach or even to only recruiters - because there’s so much more opportunity out there. You just need to be able to know how to find it and how to seize it! Kind of like a heat-seeking missile… ;)